[A-List] U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site (But Authorized New Covert Action against Iran)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html>
January 11, 2009
U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last
year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on
Iran's main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had
authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran's suspected
effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and
foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had
decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States
protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying
to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left
office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an
Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran's major nuclear complex
at Natanz, where the country's only known uranium enrichment plant is
located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said,
and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the
tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up
intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new
American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran's nuclear infrastructure, a
major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to
President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush
administration's efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on
Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and
former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear
inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the
record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence
developed on Iran.

Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this
account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and
administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.

The interviews also suggest that while Mr. Bush was extensively
briefed on options for an overt American attack on Iran's facilities,
he never instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning,
even during the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some
critics have suggested.

The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top
administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates,
that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead
to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran's nuclear
effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the
possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in
which America's 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become
involved.

Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions
aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the
sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to
slow the uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the
question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a
conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions
for Mr. Obama.

The covert American program, started in early 2008, includes renewed
American efforts to penetrate Iran's nuclear supply chain abroad,
along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine
electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran
relies. It is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the
weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear
weapon.

Knowledge of the program has been closely held, yet inside the Bush
administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of
success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran's nuclear program
have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not
derailed, their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.

Late last year, international inspectors estimated that Iran had 3,800
centrifuges spinning, but American intelligence officials now estimate
that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000, enough to produce about one
weapon's worth of uranium every eight months or so.

While declining to be specific, one American official dismissed the
latest covert operations against Iran as "science experiments." One
senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave
office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons
capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have
been dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the
American effort was unlikely to prove effective.

Since his election on Nov. 4, Mr. Obama has been extensively briefed
on the American actions in Iran, though his transition aides have
refused to comment on the issue.

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama must decide whether the covert
actions begun by Mr. Bush are worth the risks of disrupting what he
has pledged will be a more active diplomatic effort to engage with
Iran.

Either course could carry risks for Mr. Obama. An inherited
intelligence or military mission that went wrong could backfire, as
happened to President Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba.
But a decision to pull back on operations aimed at Iran could leave
Mr. Obama vulnerable to charges that he is allowing Iran to speed
ahead toward a nuclear capacity, one that could change the contours of
power in the Middle East.

An Intelligence Conflict

Israel's effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and
permission to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its
disbelief and anger at an American intelligence assessment completed
in late 2007 that concluded that Iran had effectively suspended its
development of nuclear weapons four years earlier.

That conclusion also stunned Mr. Bush's national security team — and
Mr. Bush himself, who was deeply suspicious of the conclusion,
according to officials who discussed it with him.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove
of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran's computer networks.

Those reports indicated that Iranian engineers had been ordered to
halt development of a nuclear warhead in 2003, even while they
continued to speed ahead in enriching uranium, the most difficult
obstacle to building a weapon.

The "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate, which were
publicly released, emphasized the suspension of the weapons work.

The public version made only glancing reference to evidence described
at great length in the 140-page classified version of the assessment:
the suspicion that Iran had 10 or 15 other nuclear-related facilities,
never opened to international inspectors, where enrichment activity,
weapons work or the manufacturing of centrifuges might be taking
place.

The Israelis responded angrily and rebutted the American report,
providing American intelligence officials and Adm. Mike Mullen, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with evidence that they said
indicated that the Iranians were still working on a weapon.

While the Americans were not convinced that the Iranian weapons
development was continuing, the Israelis were not the only ones highly
critical of the United States report. Secretary Gates, a former
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the report had
presented the evidence poorly, underemphasizing the importance of
Iran's enrichment activity and overemphasizing the suspension of a
weapons-design effort that could easily be turned back on.

In an interview, Mr. Gates said that in his whole career he had never
seen "an N.I.E. that had such an impact on U.S. diplomacy," because
"people figured, well, the military option is now off the table."

Prime Minister Olmert came to the same conclusion. He had previously
expected, according to several Americans and Israeli officials, that
Mr. Bush would deal with Iran's nuclear program before he left office.
"Now," said one American official who bore the brunt of Israel's
reaction, "they didn't believe he would."

Attack Planning

Early in 2008, the Israeli government signaled that it might be
preparing to take matters into its own hands. In a series of meetings,
Israeli officials asked Washington for a new generation of powerful
bunker-busters, far more capable of blowing up a deep underground
plant than anything in Israel's arsenal of conventional weapons. They
asked for refueling equipment that would allow their aircraft to reach
Iran and return to Israel. And they asked for the right to fly over
Iraq.

Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off, but
"we said 'hell no' to the overflights," one of his top aides said. At
the White House and the Pentagon, there was widespread concern that a
political uproar in Iraq about the use of its American-controlled
airspace could result in the expulsion of American forces from the
country.

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor, declined
several requests over the past four weeks to be interviewed about
Israel's efforts to obtain the weapons from Washington, saying through
aides that he was too busy.

Last June, the Israelis conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean
Sea that appeared to be a dry run for an attack on the enrichment
plant at Natanz. When the exercise was analyzed at the Pentagon,
officials concluded that the distances flown almost exactly equaled
the distance between Israel and the Iranian nuclear site.

"This really spooked a lot of people," one White House official said.
White House officials discussed the possibility that the Israelis
would fly over Iraq without American permission. In that case, would
the American military be ordered to shoot them down? If the United
States did not interfere to stop an Israeli attack, would the Bush
administration be accused of being complicit in it?

Admiral Mullen, traveling to Israel in early July on a previously
scheduled trip, questioned Israeli officials about their intentions.
His Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, argued that an
aerial attack could set Iran's program back by two or three years,
according to officials familiar with the exchange. The American
estimates at the time were far more conservative.

Yet by the time Admiral Mullen made his visit, Israeli officials
appear to have concluded that without American help, they were not yet
capable of hitting the site effectively enough to strike a decisive
blow against the Iranian program.

The United States did give Israel one item on its shopping list:
high-powered radar, called the X-Band, to detect any Iranian missile
launchings. It was the only element in the Israeli request that could
be used solely for defense, not offense.

Mr. Gates's spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said last week that Mr. Gates —
whom Mr. Obama is retaining as defense secretary — believed that "a
potential strike on the Iranian facilities is not something that we or
anyone else should be pursuing at this time."

A New Covert Push

Throughout 2008, the Bush administration insisted that it had a plan
to deal with the Iranians: applying overwhelming financial pressure
that would persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, as foreign
enterprises like the French company Total pulled out of Iranian oil
projects, European banks cut financing, and trade credits were
squeezed.

But the Iranians were making uranium faster than the sanctions were
making progress. As Mr. Bush realized that the sanctions he had
pressed for were inadequate and his military options untenable, he
turned to the C.I.A. His hope, several people involved in the program
said, was to create some leverage against the Iranians, by setting
back their nuclear program while sanctions continued and, more
recently, oil prices dropped precipitously.

There were two specific objectives: to slow progress at Natanz and
other known and suspected nuclear facilities, and keep the pressure on
a little-known Iranian professor named Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a scientist
described in classified portions of American intelligence reports as
deeply involved in an effort to design a nuclear warhead for Iran.

Past American-led efforts aimed at Natanz had yielded little result.
Several years ago, foreign intelligence services tinkered with
individual power units that Iran bought in Turkey to drive its
centrifuges, the floor-to-ceiling silvery tubes that spin at the speed
of sound, enriching uranium for use in power stations or, with
additional enrichment, nuclear weapons.

A number of centrifuges blew up, prompting public declarations of
sabotage by Iranian officials. An engineer in Switzerland, who worked
with the Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been
"turned" by American intelligence officials and helped them slip
faulty technology into parts bought by the Iranians.

What Mr. Bush authorized, and informed a narrow group of Congressional
leaders about, was a far broader effort, aimed at the entire
industrial infrastructure that supports the Iranian nuclear program.
Some of the efforts focused on ways to destabilize the centrifuges.
The details are closely held, for obvious reasons, by American
officials. One official, however, said, "It was not until the last
year that they got really imaginative about what one could do to screw
up the system."

Then, he cautioned, "none of these are game-changers," meaning that
the efforts would not necessarily cripple the Iranian program. Others
in the administration strongly disagree.

In the end, success or failure may come down to how much pressure can
be brought to bear on Mr. Fakrizadeh, whom the 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate identifies, in its classified sections, as the
manager of Project 110 and Project 111. According to a presentation by
the chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, those
were the names for two Iranian efforts that appeared to be dedicated
to designing a warhead and making it work with an Iranian missile.
Iranian officials say the projects are a fiction, made up by the
United States.

While the international agency readily concedes that the evidence
about the two projects remains murky, one of the documents it briefly
displayed at a meeting of the agency's member countries in Vienna last
year, from Mr. Fakrizadeh's projects, showed the chronology of a
missile launching, ending with a warhead exploding about 650 yards
above ground — approximately the altitude from which the bomb dropped
on Hiroshima was detonated.

The exact status of Mr. Fakrizadeh's projects today is unclear. While
the National Intelligence Estimate reported that activity on Projects
110 and 111 had been halted, the fear among intelligence agencies is
that if the weapons design projects are turned back on, will they
know?

David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York
Times. Reporting for this article was developed in the course of
research for "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the
Challenges to American Power," to be published Tuesday by Harmony
Books.